Goddess: Inside Madonna (16 page)

While Madonna’s response to Bernhard was flip, the normal attachment that Madonna felt for her mother as the “possessor of the nourishing breast,” the natural parent who would protect her against anxiety and harm, was taken from her prematurely when her mother died. In response, Madonna expected her father to provide the same nurturing that she had gotten from her mother, and when he didn’t or couldn’t, especially after he remarried, her bitterness knew no bounds.

Madonna has always regretted that her father was not more open and communicative with her. It would have made it easier to explain her feelings instead of harboring such resentment. Even today, long after the fact and years since she has accepted that her father made a new life for himself, she still has difficulty with his inability to recognize her success. Madonna would like him to acknowledge that her need to succeed was based on what she had endured as a little girl. There is a charming naïveté about Tony Ciccone, a reticence to concede that his oldest daughter, much as he had done years before, has the same determination to turn adversity into success. Rather than appearing impressed by her, he projects a combination of awe, bewilderment, vague embarrassment, and only a hint of parental pride. Though he recognizes Madonna’s celebrity, he is careful not to make it seem more important than the accomplishments of his other seven children. “All my children are struggling hard to make a niche for themselves, so I can’t be more proud of one than the other. I don’t measure success in terms of money,” he explains. “Deep down, I consider that it was much more difficult for my parents to have made a life in America after they left Italy. That took a lot more determination and courage and another kind of talent!”

For the girl who feigned masturbation with a crucifix in her video “Like a Prayer” and simulated oral sex on a water bottle in her documentary
Truth or Dare
, Madonna nonetheless still needs her father’s approval for everything she does. Her behavior is just as contradictory when she claims that her sense of “romanticism” and her concept of “true love” are defined by her father, including his purported belief that love and sex are inseparable and that making love is as sacred an act as taking Communion. “He is someone who believed that you shouldn’t make love to someone until after you’re married,” Madonna said. “He stuck by those beliefs and that represented a very strong person to me.”

While Madonna was not witness to her father’s behavior prior to his marriage to her mother, she was well aware that after her mother’s death, until he remarried, Tony Ciccone was devoted to his children and conducted his life not as a single man but rather as a single parent. Despite the ambiguity in her relationship with her father, Madonna is deeply attached to him. Shortly before her wedding to Guy Ritchie, she said about her father, “Things have been tough, and we’ve gone through bad periods when we didn’t even speak, but I just love that man.”

The caveat at the beginning of her book,
Sex
, is extremely telling. “I am an actress,” she proclaimed, “and I took on the persona of Dita [the dominatrix heroine] only as a role which I could identify with and which I chose to portray to allow my fans to liberate their own sexual fantasies. Nothing in this book is true. I made it all up.”

Despite Madonna’s sexual bravado, it is not difficult to imagine that those words were written for one person only—her father.

A
fter her mother’s death on December 1, 1963, Madonna decided that because she had been her mother’s favorite, carried her name, and resembled her more than any of the other children, she was the guardian of her mother’s memory. As the oldest daughter and the child who had the most accurate recollection of her mother’s brief life and protracted death, she designated herself “family historian.”

In the months following Madonna Fortin Ciccone’s death, the children continued to be shuttled to relatives and friends, although they would stay most often and for long periods of time with their maternal grandmother. “I had the children a lot during the summers after my daughter died,” Mrs. Fortin explains. “In fact, the whole family would come and visit quite often.” In addition to her daughter’s six children, after her son Dale died, Mrs. Fortin took care of his seven children as well. “Thirteen of my grandchildren each lost a parent, so I felt it was my duty to give them all a sense of family, although I must admit,” she adds, “that I was closest to Madonna.” Carl Fortin, who, at the time, was a musician in a local nightclub band, agrees with his mother. “We were always a close family,” he says, “but my sister’s death brought us all closer together, because there were so many kids still growing up.”

Throughout her life, Madonna has constantly expressed the desire to find out everything about her mother, and yet, according to Bay City residents who grew up with her, Madonna has never sought them out.

Wanda McPharlin was Madonna Fortin Ciccone’s neighbor and best friend and the mother of Moira McPharlin, who was Madonna’s best childhood friend when the families lived in the same neighborhood in Pontiac, Michigan. After her father remarried and the family moved from Pontiac to Rochester Hills, the two best friends didn’t see each other as often but still remained close. When Madonna was in the tenth grade and Moira, who was two years older, graduated from high school, the friends lost touch completely. McPharlin left home and for several years heavily used drugs and alcohol and went “on the road” to work as a topless dancer. Not until many years later, when Madonna was a star and Moira McPharlin was in recovery, married, and the mother of four little boys and pregnant with her fifth child, were the two women reunited. Moira became part of rock-and-roll history when she went backstage in Detroit after Madonna’s Blond Ambition concert and found herself one of the cast of characters in
Truth or Dare
. Though she got her fifteen minutes of fame on-camera, she had no idea how brutal that brief encounter would be.

Moira waits backstage for Madonna to appear. Alek Keshishian, recording everything with his handheld camera, follows Madonna, surrounded by her entourage as she makes her way toward her dressing room for the reunion with her childhood friend. On the way, Madonna explains how much she worshiped Moira, how Moira taught her how to “shave her legs and use a Tampax.” Madonna’s on-camera flip account is tame in comparison to her diva demeanor when the two women actually come face-to-face.

The camera is back on Moira, who hears Madonna approaching. Moira is nervous and obviously intimidated as the star appears. They hug and kiss. Moira asks if they could sit down and talk for a few minutes privately, to which Madonna replies that she doesn’t have the time. Holding her pregnant belly, Moira asks Madonna if she ever got her letter several years back, asking her to be the godmother to her little boy Mario. Madonna replies that she received the letter long after it had been mailed. Moira, tears welling in her eyes, hastily explains that this pregnancy was an accident and, knowing that she only has a minute or two with the star, blurts out that she would like Madonna to be the unborn baby’s godmother. “I want you to bless this child,” Moira says hurriedly. “I want you to pray that it’s a girl so I can name her Madonna.” Madonna responds that she will have to think about it, a reasonable answer for someone who takes the role of godmother seriously. And yet, that brief exchange makes it painfully apparent that each woman views the meeting from opposing ends of the emotional spectrum. One imagines Moira McPharlin spending months trying to find the best way to broach the subject with her now famous friend, and finally when the moment comes and she actually gets to ask the question, her request is refused in an instant, and her dreams are dashed. Madonna, however, apparently uses the occasion to shock her public. The camera is jostled about during an uncomfortable silence that follows the brief conversation. Madonna turns to leave, still surrounded by her entourage, while Moira appears visibly crushed. The camera pans back to Moira, who suddenly gathers momentum and murmurs sotto voce, “Little shit!” This is a simple, unsophisticated woman who is no match for the star. The camera is now on Madonna, who turns back and looks at Moira for an instant. Again Moira is in the camera’s sights, vague expression of hope in her eyes, until Madonna says cheerfully to no one in particular but to everyone who happens to be standing around, “Did you know that Moira was the first girl I ever finger-fucked?” Clearly mortified, McPharlin tries to make light of her surprise distinction in the singer’s life. “We never did that, Madonna!” McPharlin protests. Madonna laughs. “I remember getting in bed naked with you,” she says before turning to her squad of admirers and adding, “I distinctly remember seeing Moira’s bush in my face.” Moira shakes her head, desperately trying to recover. “Oh, yeah?” She looks helplessly at the others. “See what a combination of alcohol and drugs can do? You lose a lot of stuff like that.”

Madonna has been photographed sprawled across her mother’s grave. She has written songs about her, created videos where gruesome images of death and dying figure prominently in the story line. She has given interviews about her feelings of loss and rejection and has declared on numerous occasions that the death of her mother contributed to her quest for fame. However, she has never shared a major part of her grief. Only with her maternal grandmother has she talked intimately about her mother, evoked memories and asked questions about the woman who disappeared from her life when she wasn’t yet six. In response to a tragedy or a trauma, some people will replay the event while others will block it out. Madonna has managed to do both.

After several months of shuttling
the children between relatives, Tony Ciccone realized that he couldn’t continue to keep the family separated. He decided to hire a housekeeper to manage his brood while he tried to carry on some semblance of a normal life. Predictably, he went through a succession of women who were unable to cope with children who were so unwilling to accept a stranger as an authority figure. One woman who lasted longer than most, a total of three weeks, and who had been recommended by the parish housekeeper at the Visitation Catholic Church in Bay City, remembers that a “sadness hung over the house like a pall.” Rita Cavanagh elaborates, “It was a house without joy, and even though there was noise and children and chaos, it wasn’t a happy home. The thing that stays with me is the sadness in that man’s eyes when he walked through the door at night. It was almost painful for him to pick up those kids, because it must have reminded him so much of their poor mother.” Mrs. Cavanagh claims that she left not so much because the children overwhelmed her, but because she found herself depressed. “No matter what I did, I just couldn’t heal that big hurt they all had. Those kids broke my heart.”

In the spring of 1966, Tony Ciccone hired a pretty, petite, blond, blue-eyed twenty-three-year-old woman. Joan Gustafson went to work as a housekeeper to earn enough money to start a day-care center. One of her oldest friends, who still lives in her hometown of Taylor, Michigan, has another opinion about why Joan Gustafson decided to marry into a ready-made family of six. Joan, who was the only daughter in a family with limited education and financial resources, always wanted to move to the “big city” and marry a successful man. “Detroit was the big city to Joan,” her friend says, “and when she decided to get a job as a housekeeper in a suburb of Detroit, she was hoping it would be a home where there was no woman. She didn’t want anyone telling her what to do. Joan wanted to run the show. She used to tell people that she wanted to save enough money to start a day-care center.”

Given Tony Ciccone’s sense of
propriety, his courtship of the young woman who was twelve years his junior lasted only several months before the couple married. According to Joan’s friend, Joan was instantly attracted to the single father of six, who did not seem particularly interested in or aware of the feelings he evoked in the young housekeeper. “She was very perceptive,” the friend explains. “She sensed right away that he was conflicted. We had many conversations when Joanie told me that while he mourned his wife, he was still a man who had needs.”

Initially, Joan arrived at the Ciccone home in the morning and left after dinner. One evening, Tony arrived later than usual because of a blinding snowstorm. He suggested that Joan stay overnight instead of risking a dangerous drive back home. “It was a natural transition,” the friend maintains. “He needed someone to talk to and probably more, and one thing led to another . . .”

After the marriage, the transition from caretaker to stepmother was clear when she moved in to become the woman of the house who shared her husband’s bed. While there was no ambiguity about their relationship, the transition was brutal for all the children, but especially for Madonna. The relationship between Madonna and her father became increasingly strained. “After my mother died,” Madonna said, “I became fearless. There was nothing more precious that I could lose, so I became blunt.” That fearlessness and bluntness, unfortunately, occurred at the same time that Tony expected Madonna to treat his new wife with respect.

A neighbor once told Tony Ciccone that he had the “good fortune to have married two saints.” According to the neighbor, Joan Ciccone was a paragon of patience and understanding. Another friend says, “When I first met Joan, she was only twenty-three. It was inconceivable that this pretty, bright young girl would take on six children as her own. At the time, my own daughter was not much younger than Joan, and at one point I remember the two became kind of friendly. My daughter told me that Joan didn’t think twice about it. She just knew that it was her destiny to be the mother to these children, and nothing about it seemed to faze her.” During a recent interview, Joan made it clear that when she decided to marry Tony, it was not only because she had fallen in love with him, but also because she had fallen in love with his children. Several of the Ciccone children, however, take issue with that statement. “I’ll never understand why she married Dad,” a Ciccone daughter says. “She was really young, and to take on six bratty kids was tough enough for us but also for her. She was cute and could have married a young guy and started her own family. It was always a mystery why she chose Dad.”